


Ground Control

by Anonymous



Series: Within/Without [15]
Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: 3x18 Coda, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-08
Updated: 2020-06-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:40:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24597652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: “I’m in love with you,” Buck said.“Yeah, obviously I’m in love with you, too,” Eddie said, almost impatiently. “That’s not the issue here.”Without the buffer of Christopher’s company, Buck and Eddie have a bumpy road ahead of them. (post 3x18)
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley & Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV), Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Series: Within/Without [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1738876
Comments: 47
Kudos: 462
Collections: Anonymous





	Ground Control

Buck was reading up on black holes for Christopher’s latest science project.

The deeper he went, the more he wondered if it was an appropriate subject for nine-year-olds. A little morbid, right? Physicists disagreed over what would happen to you if you fell into a black hole—if you went stretch or splat. Neither option was very appealing.

Einstein predicted something called spaghettification. Gravity would stretch you in one direction and pull you in another, tugging harder on your feet than your head, until you turned into… spaghetti. Buck thought that sounded gruesomely medieval, like something that might happen on _Game of Thrones_ , which he didn’t watch because it was gruesomely medieval. But anyway, your spaghettified remains would linger in the black hole for all eternity, trapped beyond the point of no return.

The other possibility was even scarier, somehow: termination. You fell into the black hole and were instantly vaporized in a fiery storm of quantum particles, all the information once encoded in your atoms re-radiated in a quantum mechanical heat-death. Space itself fell apart; you smacked right into the end of the universe. 

Stretch or splat.

It made Buck wonder which was the likelier outcome for him and Eddie.

*

They were taking Christopher to the bus for summer camp, the three of them in the truck together, and Christopher asked them to play the song about astronauts.

Buck and Eddie looked at each other. “What astronaut song, bud?” Eddie said.

“The astronaut song!” Christopher repeated. “I heard it at Johanna’s house. The one where two astronauts are talking to each other while one of them gets launched into space.”

Chris was leaning towards being an astronaut again.

Buck opened spotify on his phone and looked for potential songs. None of the results seemed very likely, so he searched “space” instead. The first song was “Space Oddity” by David Bowie; he pressed Play.

“Yeah, that’s it!” Chris exclaimed, and asked for more volume.

So Buck played it loud. Ground Control was talking to Major Tom, the astronaut who was about to be launched into space. David Bowie’s voice jumped back and forth between the two characters—between Ground Control and Major Tom—between the one who stayed behind and the one who left.

Buck had never really listened to David Bowie, but this song cast a kind of spell.

“Play it again!” Christopher yelled, after it had finished.

They played “Space Oddity” more times than Buck had ever imagined he could listen to a song. Over and over, for the duration of the drive to the bus drop. When Chris asked for one more round, after the fifth or sixth, Buck and Eddie exchanged a weary glance. At the next stoplight, they both turned back to look at Chris, ready to tell him they couldn’t take it, they couldn’t handle one more replay of the same damn song. But as Eddie opened his mouth to say so, they noticed that Chris was putting on an imaginary astronaut helmet and speaking into an invisible walkie-talkie—“Copy that! Ground Control to Major Tom, take your protein pills and put your helmet on, do you copy Major Tom?”—his own fusion of the song and firefighter-speak.

Buck pressed Play again.

He smiled at Christopher, a watery smile because the GPS said they were less than three minutes out from their location, and then he’d have to say goodbye to Christopher for two whole weeks, which was fucking criminal. But for once, Chris didn’t smile back. He was too focused on holding fast to an imaginary steering wheel, ready to be launched in a capsule into space…

Buck knew Eddie and Christopher were the center of gravity that held his life in orbit. Earlier that year, during the mess of the embolism and the lawsuit and Eddie’s extracurricular street-fighting activities, he had felt himself drifting outward, away from the nucleus of them. Sitting in his tin can, falling far away from his best friend and his best friend’s son—as if that was all they were to him—. Not anymore, of course; these days their orbit was tighter than ever, a different kind of gravity acting upon him and Eddie.

Tugging them closer and closer to the brink, the event horizon, the place of no return—

He and Eddie both cried after they put Christopher on the bus.

Planet Earth was blue, and there was nothing they could do.

*

Buck wondered if he should offer Eddie a beer, even though it was barely nine in the morning. Something to grease the wheels. Never mind the anticipation building between them these last couple weeks; Abby’s brief cameo had done a number on Eddie, making him surly and bad-tempered. Which meant the two of them were acting all stilted and unnatural around each other, and, as far as Buck was concerned, that just wasn’t copacetic.

He couldn’t help but feel it was unfair of Christopher to leave them to their own devices at a time like this. Without Chris around, they would _have_ to talk about it, or they were in for a long, miserable fortnight.

“I feel like we both know what’s going on here,” Eddie said at last. He was leaning against the counter, eyes trained on the floor.

“Yeah, I’m starting to think you’re more hung up on Abby than I am.”

Eddie snorted.

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it,” Buck pointed out. “’Cause, Eddie—”

“Her coming back like that, I guess it just reminded me of how much I have to lose here,” Eddie said.

The unfairness of that knocked the wind out of him. “How much _you_ have to lose?”

“We both have a lot to lose,” Eddie conceded. Grudgingly.

“Christopher, our jobs, our friendship. I know.” They’d been over it all before. “Abby was here for like five minutes and now she’s back in Phoenix, with her _fiancé_ , and from where I stand, nothing’s changed for this family. And you said, Eddie, you said we were a—”

“Abby’s living proof of how changeable people are,” Eddie said.

“Abby’s changeable, sure. I’m not. Neither are you. You’re the most stubborn asshole I’ve ever met.” Eddie’s bad mood was kind of contagious.

“Whatever happens, we can’t—”

“I know.” Now Buck was the one shutting the conversation down. It wasn’t the one he wanted to have, contingency plans and worst-case scenarios.

“It’s a calculated risk, and—”

“Eddie.”

“—so many ways this could go wrong—”

“Uh huh—”

“—some long drawn out disaster, or maybe it blows up in our faces—”

Stretch, Buck thought, or splat.

But it was too late, they were already falling.

“I’m in love with you,” he said.

“Yeah, obviously I’m in love with you, too,” Eddie said, almost impatiently. “That’s not the issue here.”

“What is then?” he said, trying not to feel devastated that their grand declarations had turned into such an afterthought. “Sex?” 

“I don’t have a problem with not… being straight.”

“Really? ’Cause, Eds, it kinda sounds like you _do._ ”

“Well, what do you think you are, then?”

“Not straight. Clearly. I could see bisexual working for me, but I haven’t really, like, tried it on.”

“Huh.”

“ _Huh_? That’s all you have to say?”

“What do you want me to say, Buck?”

“You’re having a crisis, aren’t you?”

Instead of finishing their conversation, they went paintballing with Hen and Chimney. They played on the same team, obviously; just because Eddie was throwing up personal roadblocks didn’t mean Buck was gonna jeopardize his chance of winning by _not_ partnering with the guy who knew how to shoot a gun, like, professionally.

They won.

*

Buck realized they were both a lot more familiar with how relationships ended than how they began.

*

Two ways of achieving climax: sex, obviously, or a clear narrative arc with beginning, middle and end. Their story had plenty of narrative; with so much buildup, the _absence_ of a climax was frankly astonishing.

But no sex.

Not yet, anyway.

They were lying on Buck’s bed, angry and turned on. Talking about women, because talking about themselves, and what they might do together, had Eddie taut and bristling.

“So what did you like about her?”

“… her hair.”

“… that’s all?”

“I guess not.”

“What else, then?”

“…”

“What about her breasts? Did you like her breasts?”

“I don’t—… it wouldn’t have been appropriate to notice.”

“Fine. Someone you’ve actually slept with, then.”

“…not my wife.”

“No.”

Eddie rolled away, turning his back to him.

Buck sighed. “I’m trying here, Eddie.”

Eddie didn’t respond.

“I’m sick and tired of feeling like this,” he admitted. Sometimes Eddie’s back was easier to talk to than his face. “Why’s it gotta be so goddamn serious? Sex is supposed to be fun. And stupid. I think you’re overthinking it. I honestly don’t care what we do or don’t do here; why can’t we just be happy?” Eddie’s back was a rigid, unmoving plane. Buck prodded him with a socked foot. “C’mon, Eds. Dance with me a little bit.” 

“Can’t I just be in love with you without trying to put a label on myself?” Eddie said at last, still facing away.

“Yeah, of course,” Buck said. Gloating that Eddie had said the words _in love with you_ again. “Just ’cause I said bisexual _might_ work for me doesn’t mean it has to, like, work for you. If labels are a problem, then fuck ’em. You don’t need one.”

“Yeah.” Eddie didn’t sound totally convinced.

“Eddie—”

“I’m not confused,” Eddie said. “I’m just…”

“Stuck,” he supplied.

“…yeah.”

Buck rolled onto his front, narrowly resisting the urge to hump the mattress and do something about his stupid boner, which was all Eddie’s fault. He studied the shape of Eddie’s muscles under his thin t-shirt. He wondered if he ought to commit them to memory.

Buck had never bothered to properly memorize the faces and bodies of the people he’d known—even the ones he’d slept with every day, and had sex with _almost_ every day, and sometimes studied with wistful chagrin after he’d fucked them. He remembered staring at a spread of freckles on Abby’s left shoulder and thinking he knew it, every possible constellation in it. But, sitting beside her on the park bench last week, he suddenly couldn’t remember if it was the right or left shoulder, if the freckles were in fact moles, or if by joining the dots together he got a map of Mongolia, the paw of a cat, or the skeleton of a fish, and, in all honesty, that poetical shit only mattered while the person mattered.

He’d been afraid to memorize Eddie that way. Felt like he’d never had the right, until now, and maybe not even now. They were always taking their clothes off in front of one another in the locker room, but never in private. The rules were arbitrary and fucking ambiguous.

“D’you wanna go for shawarma before my shift?” he asked.

“Good idea.” Eddie didn’t budge.

“What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“You’re still hard, aren’t you?”

Silence.

“I’ve got a major one too, dude.”

Louder silence.

“Well,” Buck said, “what if I get up first, you stay there as long as you need to, and then you can join me downstairs, and we won’t mention the awkward coincidence of us having boners at the same time. How does that sound?”

Eddie laughed, finally.

It wasn’t much, but it was something. 

*

“Wait, he got stuck in _what_?” Eddie said incredulously.

“It was—it was—” Buck was howling with laughter, he could barely get the words out. “Some kind of, like, sculpture, or installation, maybe? USC art student thing. Allegedly this guy climbed inside it for a dare. His legs were totally wedged into the bottom of it. Twenty-two firefighters, Eddie, it took _twenty-two_ firefighters and five trucks—” He dissolved into laughter again. “You should have seen Bobby’s face. He was _so fucking pissed_ , it was hilarious.”

Eddie smirked. “I’ll bet.”

“And it was, like, _art_ , so we couldn’t use the jaws of life or anything to bust him out, we had to _lube_ him out, real slow…”

“Maybe I should’ve taken that extra shift with you.”

“Yeah, no kidding! It’s not every day you rescue somebody from a giant stone vagina, Eddie. Definitely beats that guy with his dick stuck in the toaster, remember him? And _Bobby_ —” He was laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe, he had to clutch onto Eddie’s shoulders for support. “Bobby tried to lecture the kid about, like, respecting art while we were extracting him, and—”

Buck lost his balance and collapsed into Eddie, shaking with mirth. Eddie anchored him with a hand at his waist. Then Eddie’s other hand caught his jaw, and Eddie was kissing him.

He didn’t even realize what was happening at first. He was laughing, Eddie was laughing, Eddie was holding him upright, and now Eddie’s mouth was on his. A firm, determined press of lips, then a slight clack of teeth because he’d been open-mouthed, laughing—

“You kissed me!” he sputtered, almost outraged. “You—you kissed me!”

“Yeah?” Eddie’s lips were parted; his mouth was waiting like a question.

“Well, fair play to you, Diaz.” He took Eddie’s face in both hands and kissed him back. It felt strange for a moment, his brain clamoring that he was kissing Eddie, he was kissing _Eddie_ , and mouths were so weird, weren’t they, all wet and fleshy and—

Then it clicked. Scorch-mouthed, they clung to each other, soft lingering kisses giving way to something more insistent. Eddie was a demanding kisser, opening his mouth to Buck’s tongue, then pushing back fiercely with his own. Buck let his fingers slide down the back of Eddie’s neck, tracing its shape. He felt a shiver go down Eddie’s spine and captured the sound in his mouth, taking advantage of Eddie’s open lips to run his tongue along them, tease him a bit. Eddie gathered him closer and deepened the kiss, changing the pressure. Buck found his hands moving of their own volition, running along Eddie’s broad shoulders and curling around his neck.

After so many weeks with the possibility of a kiss dangling between them, all the months—okay, _year_ , more than a year—of pent up feelings, fighting them back, day after day, it was a great relief to give up fighting. Give up everything, and just float in it.

Then he got greedy. He closed his lips around Eddie’s tongue and sucked, hard, and the sound Eddie made set off explosions behind his eyes. It was his brain melting, it was the world ending, maybe he’d been struck by a meteor like that girl they’d helped, or maybe he’d been hit with an asteroid like the dinosaurs on the Yucatán, maybe this was the rapture and the last thing he’d ever do was kiss Eddie before he went straight to hell.

“Well?” He broke away, breathing harshly. “What do you think?”

“What do I _think_?” Eddie’s lips were pink and swollen, his hair disheveled; he looked a bit dazed.

“Are you into it? Do you like it?” He didn’t mean for it to come out like an interrogation, but he had to _know._ There was a lot riding on Eddie’s answer.

Eddie, the bastard, rolled his eyes. “Yeah, Buck. I’m into it.”

“It felt good?”

“Yeah.” Eddie touched his own lips gingerly. “Stubble’s gonna take some getting used to. Your chin is all red, by the way. Sorry about that.”

Buck had registered, dimly, the scrape of Eddie’s stubble across his face, though he couldn’t give less of a shit about a rash or what he looked like right now. As long as _Eddie_ liked what he saw—

“You’re a fucking great kisser.” Eddie arched a brow. “Though you already knew that, didn’t you?”

Buck preened a little; he couldn’t help himself. He couldn’t help the enormous dopey smile that spread across his face either. “That was easily the hottest first kiss ever. _You’re_ hot, you’re so fucking hot, Eddie—”

“Jesus, Buck.”

“What? You are, you know you are, don’t deny it.” He laughed in delight. “Eddie, we _work._ ”

“You thought we wouldn’t?” Eddie’s eyes had narrowed; he was watching him carefully.

“I didn’t know how you’d feel about it.”

“I told you, I liked it. It felt good.”

“Do you want more?”

“What did you have in mind?” Eddie asked. 

“Everything,” he said, honestly. “Anything. Wanna touch you. Get you naked. Use my mouth on you—”

Eddie groaned, a muffled little grunt he stifled with his fist. “ _Jesus_ , Buck.”

“You asked.” Looking down, he could make out the hard line of Eddie’s cock under his jeans. All his blood surged south; he had to grip the kitchen counter for balance. “Do you want to go upstairs?”

“Yeah, I do,” Eddie said.

*

If he had to be clinical about it, Buck might have compared the experience of giving his first blowjob to having a veiny rubber tube banging around his mouth. Fortunately, he didn’t have to be clinical, and the voices exultantly chanting _Eddie, Eddie, Eddie_ in his mind went a long way towards overriding the foreignness of the act. 

Any recent fantasies he might have indulged around _choking on Eddie’s cock_ hadn’t accounted for the sheer mess of it, all the saliva trickling down his chin. He didn’t have a hope of getting the whole thing down his throat, so he used his hand to work over what didn’t fit. There was no way he made for an attractive spectacle like this, coughing and slobbering.

But. But. Eddie’s fingers were exceedingly gentle in his hair, making no attempt to pull or steer, just _there_ , ten soothing points of pressure against his scalp. When Buck managed to squint up through teary eyes, he encountered the most extraordinary view: in the immediate foreground, Eddie’s tense abdominals, yeah, all fucking six of them, then his heaving, sweaty chest, and finally, Eddie’s face, his open mouth and his wild eyes, and Buck felt more powerful and more tender than he’d ever felt in his life. _He_ did that. He did that to _Eddie._

“Buck…” Eddie’s voice was thin, reedy. Abortive little jerks of his hips had Buck gagging a bit, so he used his forearm to pin Eddie’s hips to the mattress. He sped up, breathing through his nose and trying to keep his tongue engaged. Starting to find his rhythm now, reveling in the heat pouring off Eddie’s skin. He wondered if he might get off on the sound of Eddie’s voice alone—a jumble of ragged endearments and profanities—

Cautiously, he lifted his arm off Eddie’s pelvis and used his free hand to grope his balls. 

Eddie jumped like he’d been shocked. “I—I—you need to move, or—” 

Buck ignored the hands pushing at him. He tried to take Eddie a centimeter or two deeper for the home stretch, and then Eddie’s fingers were digging into his shoulders hard and—

He swallowed like a pro.

More or less. If the _less_ was what went down his throat and the _more_ what spilled down his chin.

But it was still pretty damn spectacular.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Eddie said.

Discreetly, Buck managed to wipe his face on somebody’s discarded t-shirt. Then he crawled up between Eddie’s legs and rested his cheek on his stomach. “Was that good?”

“You ask such stupid questions sometimes,” Eddie told him, running his fingers through his hair again; Buck could feel those fingers still shaking slightly. “Any way I try to describe it, you’ll turn it into a bad pun.”

“Mind-blowing?” Buck offered.

Eddie yanked on his hair. “See? You’re infuriating.” 

“You know you love it.”

“I do,” Eddie said, simply. Giddy with success, Buck wondered if he might chance his luck on a kiss when Eddie added, “Get up here.”

He dragged himself the rest of the way up Eddie’s body. All that skin on skin was intoxicating; he could probably get himself off against Eddie’s leg in about ten seconds—

“This okay?” he asked, face hovering over Eddie’s. “Might taste weird—”

“Let’s find out,” Eddie said, and raised his head a few inches to close the distance.

Buck kept it soft, easy. He even kept his mouth closed until he felt Eddie’s tongue probing at his lips; then he opened up and let him explore. Eventually, though, he had to pull away. His dick was pressed right up against Eddie’s thigh, and he was close, too close, and he figured he should ask permission before he started humping Eddie’s leg like a horny terrier.

But first: “Weird?” he asked.

Eddie nodded.

“Bad weird?”

Eddie considered. “No, not bad weird. Just weird-weird. Kinda hot, though, tasting me on you.”

_Super hot_. “Eddie—”

“Get up here,” Eddie ordered again, and Buck didn’t know what he meant because he was, he _was_ up here. But Eddie took over, guiding Buck into position so he was kneeling astride Eddie’s chest, and god, what a vision to jerk off to, Eddie all sweaty and fucked-out beneath him—

But Eddie surprised him again, reaching up to wrap a hand around his dick. “Lemme try,” he said.

*

Once, when they were kids, Maddie had given him a birthday card that said “Today I will love you more than yesterday.” She hadn’t written it herself; the words had come printed on the card and she’d simply signed her name. But he’d kept that card for years, even after she’d left him behind. _Today I will love you more than yesterday._ It made him feel hopeful. Because even though _yesterday_ suggested a kind of shittiness, a time when she’d loved him less, _today_ she promised to love him more. And implicit in that _today_ was the promise of _tomorrow_.

Which was what he said to Eddie, sometime later, before they fell asleep: “Tomorrow I’m gonna love you even more than today,” he mumbled, dragging one of Eddie’s arms around himself and shuffling closer. “So don’t freak out in the morning.”

“I’m not gonna freak out in the morning.” Eddie sounded slightly aggrieved, even as his arm tightened around his waist. “Quit borrowing trouble.”

But a few minutes later, Eddie was tugging at him, urging him to turn around so they were facing one another.

“I might freak out in the morning,” Eddie said.

His features were smudged and indistinct in the dark, but Buck knew exactly what his face was doing. He used his fingertip to rub away the frown between Eddie’s eyebrows. “’S okay, Eds, that’s why I told you I’ll love you even more.”

“D’you think we’ve fucked us up?” Eddie asked quietly.

“By having sex?”

Eddie nodded.

“Nah.” Buck tried to marshal his thoughts into some kind of order. “I always figured us finally doing something—like fucking, or even just kissing— that would be the line, you know? Point of no return. But now that we’ve actually done those things, I’m thinking we must’ve crossed the line a long time ago without realizing it—maybe the line was different, maybe it wasn’t about sex? ’Cause it didn’t even feel that weird, the stuff we did—”

“You said you’d never given a blowjob before,” Eddie interrupted.

“I hadn’t!” Eddie was one jealous motherfucker, honestly. “And I’m not saying the, like, mechanics weren’t a little weird, but having sex with you felt pretty natural, if I’m being honest.”

Eddie _hmm_ ed.

“It’s fine if it didn’t feel natural for you!” Buck went on hastily. “I just wanted you to know that I’m feeling pretty grounded about the whole thing. In case that, like, helps.”

“It might.”

Buck kissed him. “How’d that feel?”

“Too quick.”

Buck kissed him longer, harder, dragging his fingers through the soft thatch of hair on Eddie’s chest. “What about that?”

“Good. With you…” Eddie touched his cheek, thumb dragging across his lower lip. Buck opened his mouth and bit down gently. “It’s really good. I like it.”

He was never gonna have speeches and poetry from Eddie. But he’d learnt the hard way: that shit was fleeting and not to be trusted.

“I like it, too,” he said.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry for the delay in getting this story up! Current events (in America) have impacted my family and my community pretty directly, and my brain didn't have the capacity to handle much else. I hope you're all taking good care of yourselves and finding the time to recharge as necessary. 
> 
> I have another post-S3 story in the works to follow this one, but since I've been playing with canon thus far I'm not sure how much further into the future I'll speculate. I may double back and fill in more gaps... Do let me know if you have any thoughts or preferences! 
> 
> <3


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